The day after the Day After!
27 December 2010
• Halifax NS - Living on the Dirt
by Mike, just chillin'
This morning I registered as a Friend of Laphroaig and was presented with the long term lease deed for a square foot of land on Islay Island. Since we have intent to sail over there we might just build our own croft on that leased land. Of course the croft would have to be less than a foot square but it would be nice to install/build it and take a photo before heading over to the distillery for a tour and sampling. For those of you unaware, Laphroaig is a golden peaty single malt scotch that is rather yummy. Sadly it is also quite expensive so we only have it in sipping samples and then only on special occasions.
Today is a wet snowy and rainy day that has Peri all bewildered as to whether or not he should go out and when he does go out he isn't sure if he should be walking running or wading. Poor little hound! The often dry and normally trickling little stream that takes the run-off from the housing development that abuts Deadman's Island Park is a raging torrent today and the park is back under water. As I have said before on this blog and in an e-mail to the municipality, if they don't start putting loads of fill in they will lose the park and the dead will walk. Dun-da-da-duuuuunnnn!
Tonight we will be going to a party at our friends Alan and Heather's. They are the stalwart crew of Moonlight Maid who have come home for Christmas and are kindly hosting a "do" at their condo tonight. Of course we arrived and there was no one there so home we went to check the invite. It turned out that the entrance to the condo common room was outside the main entrance and certainly not where we were trying to get in.
I am more than half-way through the first of the Bill Bryson books that I got for Christmas, "The Mother Tongue", which, as with all of his books but some far more than most, is fascinating, eminently readable and chock full of hitherto to me at least unknown facts about the language that I am writing this in. For instance, did you know that there is no real reason that a split infinitive is wrong? There are no precedents in any of the languages that founded English and certainly none in Latin. It turns out that there was one academic in years gone by that thought it wasn't a good idea; he put it in his book and everyone else since has accepted that as gospel. The book is full of stuff like that. Another example, one of the major contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary was an American named Dr Minor who was an inmate at one of the English hospitals for the criminally insane. This didn't stop him from contributing over 20,000 suggestions to the editor of the OED all from his personal library in the prison. Fascinating, eh! Oh, and Barbara is looming over my shoulder, insisting that I put in the blog that this was one of the books that she gave me for Christmas. There you go, Babe. Happy?
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